Small World theory in scientific cooperation network in the field of Iranian medicine 2009-2013

Small World is one of the existing theories in the social network analysis (SNA), which consists of clusters with local robust connections and a few global connections and shortens the distance between both two nodes of network. The aim of this study was to investigate the small world theory in co-authorship network of Iranian medicine. This study was conducted using Bibliometrics and SNA methods. Medicine word was surfed in WoS database only on Iran during 2009-2013 years. Finally, the status of this word was analyzed in terms of accordance to small world theory by drawing the co-authorship map. The results showed that more than half of researchers in this filed had communicated with each other and shaped a component in which the path length was 6.89 and the clustering coefficient was 0.85 and the index of Small World was 169.79, too. The relatively short length of path, high coefficient of clustering and also comparing the index of Small World with other researches indicates that there is a Small World.